Conference Grant Reports: Meg Everett at the American Educational Research Association
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Meg Everett presented “Centering Student Experiences with TikTok in a Critical Media Literacy Course" at the American Educational Research Association. From Meg:
The American Educational Research Association describes its Annual Meeting as the world's largest gathering of education researchers. The past year’s conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, centered on the theme: “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” I presented my work in a session titled “Transformative Digital Spaces: Disrupting Traditional Notions of Learning and Reimagining Educational Possibilities Through Social Media.” Along with two other colleagues from the School of Education at UC Berkeley, we presented papers that highlighted the ways people use digital platforms to transcend the boundaries of traditional schooling and create more relevant, empowering, and impactful learning.
My paper, “Centering Student Experiences with TikTok in a Critical Media Literacy Course,” evaluated how students examined the role of social media in society and in their lives by creating of TikTok videos, collaborating with their peers, and reflecting weekly on their own social media usage in an undergraduate course. Critical media pedagogies advocate for acknowledging and valuing students' online experiences and then placing them at the core of classroom conversations about the interplay between culture, technology, society, and power. By connecting personal experiences with class topics, students found ways to reconcile opposing perspectives which they believed paved the way for more mindful and agentic experiences on TikTok. This study demonstrated the potential of courses that enable students to engage creatively, reflectively, and analytically with social media and underscored the importance of providing media literacy instruction in educational institutions.